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In Montana, USA, there are substantial opportunities for mechanized thinning treatments on public forests to reduce the likelihood of severe and damaging wildfires and improve forest health. These treatments produce residues that can be used to generate renewable energy and displace fossil fuels. The choice modeling method is employed to examine the marginal...

Indigenous Arctic and Subarctic communities currently are facing a myriad of social and environmental changes. In response to these changes, studies concerning indigenous knowledge (IK) and climate change vulnerability, resiliency, and adaptation have increased dramatically in recent years. Risks to lives and livelihoods are often the focus of adaptation...

A significant amount of the forestland in Montana is in need of mechanical forest restoration treatments, which can improve forest health and reduce wildfire risk, but can be expensive to implement and produce little merchantable timber. One option for disposal of the small diameter material produced by these treatments is to utilize it to produce energy,...

Primary wood products manufacturers generate significant amounts of woody biomass residues that can be used as feedstocks for distributed-scale thermochemical conversion systems that produce valuable bioenergy and bioproducts. However, private investment in these technologies is driven primarily by financial performance, which is often unknown for new technologies with...

Management of aquatic and riparian ecosystems is constrained because of the reliance on ?off-the-shelf? and one-size-fits-all concepts and designs, rather than considering specific features and capabilities of the location of interest. As a result, use of fixed- width buffers that generally depend on stream size is the most common approach.

Presently there is a lack of information describing US southwestern energy consumption and emissions generated from the sawmilling industry. This article uses a mail survey of softwood sawmills in the states of Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico to develop a profile of on-site energy consumption and selected emissions for the industry. Energy consumption is...

Over the past 20 years, the mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae) has caused considerable tree mortality across the Rocky Mountain region of the western United States. Although the operational and cost impacts of dead timber are generally well known in the sawmill industry, there remains a need to better understand the impact of large-scale outbreaks on the...

We tested three disturbance hypotheses in young conifer plantations: H1: soil compaction and removal of surface organic matter produces sustained changes in microbial community size, activity, and structure in mineral soil; H2: microbial community characteristics in mineral soil are linked to the recovery of plant diversity...

We tested three disturbance hypotheses in young conifer plantations: H1: soil compaction and removal of surface organic matter produces sustained changes in microbial community size, activity, and structure in mineral soil; H2: microbial community characteristics in mineral soil are linked to the recovery of plant diversity...

An intermediate-complexity, quasi-physically based, meteorological model (MicroMet) has been developed to produce high-resolution (e.g., 30-m to 1-km horizontal grid increment) atmospheric forcings required to run spatially distributed terrestrial models over a wide variety of landscapes. The following eight variables, required to run most terrestrial models, are...

The soils of the central Oregon pumice plateau are relatively young and infertile, yet support an array of plant diversity and growth in the region's pine forests. Whether these coarse-textured, pumice and ash soils are resilient to forest disturbance is not well understood. We present results from a long-term experiment that examined changes in soil quality in...

In the sawmill sector of the forest products industry, the clustering of mills and wide variation in forest stocking and ownership result in sawlog markets that are complex and spatially differentiated. Despite the inherent spatial attributes of markets for stumpage and logs, few studies have used geospatial methods to examine wood procurement in detail across...

The ecological effects of post-thinning slash retention on vegetation, wildlife browse, and soil were evaluated in sixty-year-old stands of second-growth pine in central Oregon. Three slash-retention treatments were compared: whole-tree removal, bole-only removal, and thin no removal (boles and slash scattered on site). The study intent was to create a wide gradient of...

Mechanical mastication converts shrub and small tree fuels into surface fuels, and this method is being widely used as a treatment to reduce fire hazard. The compactness of these fuelbeds is thought to moderate fire behaviour, but whether standard fuel models can accurately predict fire behaviour and effects is poorly understood. Prescribed burns were conducted in...

Cofiring forest biomass residues with coal to generate electricity is often cited for its potential to offset fossil fuels and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but the extent to which cofiring achieves these objectives is highly dependent on case specific variables. This paper uses facility and forest specific data to examine emissions from cofiring forest biomass with...

Forest and mill residues are a promising source of biomass feedstock for the production of bioenergy, biofuels and bioproducts. However, high costs of transportation and handling of feedstock often make utilization of forest residues, such as logging slash, financially unviable. As a result, these materials are often considered waste and left on site to decompose or...

In: Roise, Joe, comp. Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Council on Forest Engineering: Engineering New Solutions for Energy Supply and Demand; September 9-12, 2012; New Bern, NC. Morgantown, WV: Council on Forest Engineering. Online: http://web1.cnre.vt.edu/forestry/cofe/documents/2012/1425_Chung_W-COFE2012.pdf

Forest operations generate large quantities of forest biomass residues that can be used for production of bioenergy and bioproducts. However, a significant portion of recoverable residues are inaccessible to large chip vans, making use financially infeasible. New production systems must be developed to increase productivity and reduce costs to facilitate use of these...